


How to be Dead

by chell-surname-redacted (failsafe)



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Community: hc_bingo, F/M, Implied Character Death, Post-Portal 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-22
Updated: 2012-09-22
Packaged: 2017-11-14 20:14:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/519105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/failsafe/pseuds/chell-surname-redacted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He is missing and GLaDOS has no record of what happened to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to be Dead

**Author's Note:**

> Written for hc_bingo.  
> Prompt: poltergeist

The girl was gone. Lifted up and up into the world above until GLaDOS lost all sense of her vital signs. She had been aware of them for so long, except for that interval of time when She had been dead at the girl's hand. Her next human test subject, then Her last viable one. She was gone now, and it was for the best, the easiest solution to the problem. 

The Co-Operative Testing Initiative had been underway for a while now. There was no need to account for how long as it would go on for as long as She wanted, needed it to. Nonetheless, it had been a long time when She sent the two testing robots down into the bowels of Aperture, violently disassembled them and then _waited_ to put them back together. Someone had to clean this place up and that Someone was always Her. She was the only one left. 

She was utterly unimpressed with the humans' leavings most of the time. Some of them She understood, some of them She didn't care to. 

Then there were those _markings_. The girl's face was among them and for a moment, GLaDOS considered destroying it. It wasn't important. 

“It's been a long time,” She said instead, offering a long, long moment of silence in which someone else could chime in, _speak_. 

She waited, anticipated. Every camera in the facility slowly scanned and She made a clean, slow rotation in Her chassis too. Nothing answered. No one answered. 

_“Bite me,”_ he had said the first time. It had been an odd turn of phrase but left Her undeterred. Surely even he understood that She didn't have teeth. 

Outrage slowly overshadowed Her calm, nearly complacent waiting.

“Where are you?” She demanded, her voice filling up a new register and booming through every speaker grill in the place. She didn't have cameras inside the walls. He had known that. She tried checking there anyway and pieces of Her facility began to crumble once more, structural integrity breached, and She hardly noticed. 

“Are you still there?” She tried again, frustrated and only a while later realizing She was echoing the hive-mind obsession of much lesser machines. She was in dire need to stimulating conversation. 

Old testing tracks were upended, shaken, searched like a child trying desperately to coax some new thing out of an empty package. One of those cubes he had been so fond of shook free and tumbled down into a black, formless void. There still wasn't any sign of him. 

The most disturbing part of it was that She had no record of when She had stopped being aware of him. He had been there the entire time, the last time, a bit of loose, nattering background information, not even a nuisance relative to the facility-destroying child running free and making havoc all over the place. He had only ever managed to vandalize as far as She was concerned, and he was only human. 

There were no records of him having exited the facility, none of him having died there. No recognizable trace of his blood anymore. Like everything else about humans, the blood faded, only he hadn't simply slowly ebbed away, like the girl being lifted toward her precious sky. He had simply stopped, or started, and GLaDOS did not know. He was a gap now, an anomaly in a new way that he had been before—the sole survivor. Now he was neither survivor nor victim... 

She spent hours, days, time immeasurable and irrelevant searching—combing data, scanning rooms, tearing apart walls. He still escaped her grasp in all but empty, now groundless memory. 

He wasn't alive. He wasn't dead. Not until she found him somewhere in Her vast, endless, vacant box.


End file.
